Game comparison chart

As I explained in a previous post, once I start uploading reviewes, I'll refrain from scoring them. Instead, I'll publish a chart with similar games, showing their quality difference with the reviwee.
The last two nights I've been awake for much longer that it is healthy, programming the tool to automatically generate the game charts, based on simple better/worse pairs. Once the ideas were established, it was only a matter of coding, learning how SVG works, remembering how to generate XMLs with Linq's XDocument -never again without it-, and using some advanced XML features.
So, I'll explain in a few words what I have done.

First of all, is the data I work with. I keep a simple XML document with games and comparisons. Games are specified as:

    <games>
        <game id="Dragon Age" year="2009" url="http://social.bioware.com">
            <names>
                <name value="Dragon Age: Origins"/>
            </names>
        </game>
        <game id="Mass Effect 2" year="2010"/>
        <game id="Mass Effect" year="2008"/>
        <game id="Baldur's Gate" year="1996" url="http://www.gog.com"/>
        <game id="Baldur's Gate 2" year="1997">
            <names>
                <name value="Baldur's Gate II"/>
                <name value="Baldur's Gate II: Shadows of Amn"/>
            </names>
        </game>
        <game id="Neverwinter Nights" year="2000"/>
        <game id="Icewind Dale" year="1997"/>
        <game id="KotOR" year="1999">
            <names>
                <name value="Knights of the Old Republic"/>
            </names>
        </game>
        <game id="Oblivion" year="2006">
            <names>
                <name value="The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion"/>
            </names>
        </game>
        <game id="Gothic" year="2001"/>
        <game id="Fallout" year="1997"/>
        <game id="Planescape: Torment" year="2000"/>
    </games>

The ID is the name the game is usually known for, the URL would point to that game's review, if I have one up, and the year... I have not verified them for this test file, so they are most probably not the year the game was released.

On Game reviews, part 1 - To Score or not to Score

Note: For an interestingly concise, yet deep analysis of the scoring system and its issues, as it is currently implemented in the video-game industry, you'd do yourself a favour checking this post entry I found by sheer chance.

Now you're done with that, I will add my two cents to this too-long-going clusterfuck. And, please, let me disregard the whole public relationships point of view and focus on the players. They are the target, the interested party, the beginning and end of games review. The review's sole purpose is to indicate whether a game is worth being played or not. Even the quality/price threshold must be left out of the review, as it changes from one person to another.

What are game reviews for?

In the previous draft of this post I went into a rant about how much I loved the old Insert Credit reviews and how no site comes close to them. But, in the end, I can answer the question without getting into that sad story: a review is only a way to tell a gamer if a game rocks or not.
And how do we know if we are going to like something? As with everything else, by comparing it to what we know already. This is the role the final score in a review plays. It charts a game against an perfect ideal, which would achieve succesfully everything it tried, while trying to do something interesting in similar terms than the reviewed game. The problem is that, really, nobody knows what this perfect game looks like, as it changes depending on the reviewer, the reader and the game. The decission of whether a game is actually any good or not is based on, first of all, trying to guess what the ideal it is being compared to is. Second, if the reviewer would like that ideal, or has even thought of the same image of perfection. And, then, determining what the score means in all that mess.